by Dick Croy
Just then Catherine herself burst through the front door carrying her backpack. “Hi!” she shouted from the porch. She hoisted the full pack onto her shoulders and strode over to the two of them. “Douglas, this is my friend Eugene.”
“We just met,” said Eugene. Catherine put her arm warmly around Douglas and smiled up into his face. It betrayed hurt and jealousy as well as incomprehension. Her smile softened in response and she brought into her voice a gentleness that Eugene hadn’t yet heard in it.
“Douglas, I’m going to be camping out for a few days. Could you please look after Jebel for me while I’m gone?”
Whether her manner wasn’t soft enough, or whether it had melted Douglas’s emotional paralysis, the frozen expression on his face dissolved into one that quivered on the edge of condemnation or betrayal. Catherine hadn’t anticipated this but it went right to her heart. She grabbed his hands and eyes with her own. For a moment Eugene wasn’t even there.
“…We’re friends aren’t we?” Seeing Douglas’s struggle to understand and to throw off his dark thoughts, Catherine stretched to kiss him on the cheek. Then on tiptoe she whispered into his ear: “I love you, you know.”
He was thunder-struck by the statement. Catherine was a little surprised, and delighted, by it herself. Even she hadn’t been aware until now of the depth of her feeling for Douglas. With a hand touching his arm, she looked questioningly into his eyes, asking him whether he understood the kind of love she was talking about while reassuring him that she had not used the word lightly.
Eugene was looking on in fascination. Uncomfortable at first to be intruding on what seemed so intimate a confrontation, he quickly realized that his presence wasn’t hindering in the slightest what was taking place between these two. He felt unaccountably close to Douglas himself and wondered how he would respond to this patient and persuasive young woman Eugene was seeing for the first time.
Douglas’s eyes, which until Catherine’s electrifying words had been peering from his face like those of a wounded animal, now reached out boldly for confirmation of what she had said. He must have found it. The suspicious, hurt, and reproachful adolescent by whom Eugene had been met was suddenly gone. In his place was a self-possessed young man through whose eyes shone the soul of a child. Here was conviction in a face completely open, expressing a love for Catherine as clear and natural and brilliant as sunlight. What was most remarkable about the transformation was that it was entirely believable. It left Eugene feeling neither skeptical nor uneasy, but inspired—as if he had just been given an insight into the essential nature of love, uncolored by all the emotional trappings which usually obscure and distort and contaminate it.
Catherine was utterly absorbed in Douglas’s about-face. She bathed in it, finally thinking to share the experience with Eugene. He felt the look coming and found himself grinning, nodding his head as their eyes met. Catherine hugged Douglas and, still held by his eyes, pulled dreamily away, walking over to the motorcycle like some blissed-out flower child. This was the Valkyrie who had come riding in on a bolt of lightning at the pool?
Perhaps his thoughts were more apparent than Eugene realized, because she began to come back down to earth. A touch of sadness or resignation crossed her face. He even fancied that her eyes blazed up for a moment as if, feeling suddenly vulnerable, to warn him. I can still take care of myself!
He helped her stow the backpack, then she got on behind him. “Bye, Douglas—take care of Jebel for me.”
“I will, Cathrun.”
Smiling, Eugene nodded to Douglas, who looked on without responding. Catherine hugged him from behind, her cheek against the warm leather of his jacket. He glanced around to make sure she was ready, and as they accelerated down the drive, she turned and waved to Douglas.
He waved back, watching them until they were out of sight. When he turned, Lucille was standing at the door. “That girl,” she said, shaking her head in concern and exasperation as Douglas came up onto the porch.
“She’ll be okay, Aunt Lucille. She knows what she’s doin’. That Eu-gene must be a good man.”
He said this with such uncharacteristic authority that Lucille stared open-mouthed after him as he entered the house. Kids, she said to herself. How mysterious and hidden their ways of self-initiation. All you can do is stand back and wait to be invited now and then into that secret and privileged world. She opened the door with a sigh not of weariness but acceptance as she went in to serve Douglas his lunch.
While Eugene and Catherine, a bright buzzing speck on the road to Mt. Shasta, were observed in distant cool detachment through dark glasses.
Chapter 21
Becky spoke for all of them. “What’re we wastin’ our time for on some punk stunt-rider and his snot-nosed girlfriend?”
“Punk…stunt-rider?” If Becky’s tone was, as usual, close to 10 on a scale of 1-10 in contemptuousness, the Leader’s hovered somewhere around 15. His gloved hand came up to the sunglasses no one could remember ever seeing him without. He settled them more snugly against the bridge of his nose and cocked his head to look from Becky to the rest of the Gang in the background.
“I think she’s right, man.” The Fool’s remark, as close as anyone had come in a long time to challenging the Leader’s authority, threw a stifling silence over the group. The Leader held him in his eyeless gaze as if the Fool were no more than a fly buzzing helplessly under his thumb.
“You don’t think,” he said finally. “Period.”
“Whattaya find so interesting about him though, man?” The Chinaman was always pushing. Was this the beginning of a mutiny?
“Anybody here wants to leave…” The Leader completed the suggestion with a shrug of utter disdain, an almost imperceptible turning out of his left hand: an ambiguous gesture which implied consequences either not worth mentioning or too dire to consider. No one was about to leave, and they all knew it.
But the Leader knew the secret of rationing strength. Unremitting dominance was not only boring but ultimately self-defeating, since it either crushed its subjects or forced them to rebel. He had no intention of becoming a babysitter; and in any case, with this bunch an unrelenting hand would eventually bring revolt. He knew of a Hell’s Angel whose too-heavy hand had won him the honor of choosing between being dragged to a disintegrating pulp behind the new leader’s bike, or having his hands and legs tied to four different machines and being swiftly quartered. He’d chosen the shorter route. It was said that a video of his quadripartite exit existed: a grisly road picture known in underground circles as The Travelogue.
How stupid, when all that would have been necessary was an occasional concession to his followers’ delusion that their servitude was voluntary, their tour of duty subject only to their own discretion. What’s more, it suited the purposes of followers and leader alike to confine such agreements to the most trivial of issues. Otherwise those led would be forced to make significant decisions themselves—by committee yet. Although they all clamored constantly for a voice in determining how and where the Gang was going to spend its time and plundered resources, for most of them the only thing worse than being responsible for such a decision was to entrust it to one of the others.
All these axioms of human nature the Leader knew intuitively, while experience had taught him the subtle refinements that kept him at the top. Knowing where their quarry was headed, he decided it was time to kick back for a while and let all the hostilities, tensions and aggressions in his tour group come to the surface and reestablish that tenuous equilibrium which kept the Gang at one another’s throats, rather than aligned against him. While they fought and argued amongst themselves, he would hover over his prey like a cat toying with the rabbit it has playfully maimed…or a spider content to suck out its bound victim’s juices at leisure.
* * *
The city of Mt. Shasta is honest and homespun, in keeping with Shasta’s reputation as a spiritual or metaphysical landmark rather than a resort area like Mammoth or Aspen. Its o
nly flash and glitter come from the mountain’s snowfields. Of course civilization is slowly but steadily multiplying Mt. Shasta’s motels and restaurants, and it has a pair of ski shops now to go with its two sawmills. But the community still serves, instead of exploiting, the intercourse between the mountain and its admirers.
Catherine and Eugene entered town from the north, past the KOA campground they would use later if they wanted a hot shower. The two-lane road parallels the main line of the Southern Pacific here; trains pulled by seven or eight diesel engines rumble through every hour or so. They can be heard even high on the mountain, but the noise isn’t as intrusive as one might think. The landscape is awesome enough to absorb anything.
A northbound freight was approaching now, its mammoth engines working in unison against the upgrade. Eugene marveled at the power of these cloned behemoths, coupled in androgynous union at the head and center of the long train, the massive diesels throbbing in deep harnessed synchrony. The big Harley was a gnat in comparison, a mosquito. On the other hand, his mechanic’s skills and affinity for machines put him in the cab of the lead engine for a moment. He couldn’t even see it, the track was two short blocks away. But he didn’t need to; the sound, low and heavy enough to feel, was the connection.
The sound of any engine was a kind of music to his trained ear. It wasn’t always music he got off on. But it was sound shaped by men like himself: men who designed and built, maintained and appreciated machinery…men who knew how to take metal, tune it like an instrument or an orchestra—then pour gasoline or diesel fuel down its throat till it sang like a damn bird, a phoenix: a bird on fire.
“There’s a store up ahead where we can get some food.” Catherine’s sudden intrusion into his thoughts brought Eugene back to his body. There was a health food store on the right with a small-town supermarket across the street. He pulled to the curb in front of the Food Chakra.
“What do you usually get?” she asked as they strolled up the aisle immediately ahead of them.
“…Dried fruits and nuts mostly. Some of these freeze-dried soups and things aren’t too bad. Bread. Peanut butter—only because it’s filling. You have to get the commercial stuff or it gets rancid.”
“Fruit? Vegetables?”
“Sure. Just keep weight in mind—and there’s only so much room in back.”
“We can get the produce and peanut butter across the street. I won’t add anything to the list—unless they have some shampoo here I can use. I ran out.”
She went over to check out the organic shampoos, while Eugene did a rough calculation of what they’d need for the first two or three days. They’d already agreed to split the cost and Catherine certainly trusted his selection. She ate healthfully enough though not with the attention to nutritional detail she’d detected in some of his remarks and in the food and utensils he carried. She hated shopping for food anyway.
They had the kind of shampoo she used and she was paying for it when Eugene walked up with their supplies. The young man behind the counter was a typically lean and glowing health food enthusiast, with long clean blond hair, a beard, and that expression of earnest serenity that got under Catherine’s skin more irritatingly than almost anything else in the world. As he methodically emptied and totaled the basket of groceries, she and Eugene glanced around the small, immaculate store. On the wall beside them was a bulletin board full of announcements and posters detailing a varied assortment of new-age spiritual events, as well as the usual lost-and-found notices, pleas for roommates or living space, business cards, and tear-off numbers advertising a broad spectrum of work skills and money-making schemes. The special-events announcements ran the gamut from scribbled messages on notebook paper, through Xeroxed hand-outs, to sophisticated posters with striking graphics and lettering.
Catherine took it all in and sniffed, “The Mt. Shasta spiritual menu.”
Eugene smiled. “It certainly has variety doesn’t it. Do you know anything about any of these?”
“Are you kidding?” she asked, offended.
“Well, no, I wasn’t.” He looked at her curiously, still smiling.
“These are all just a joke as far as I’m concerned. I can’t imagine if you came up here why you’d feel you needed some kind of…” She gestured toward the board contemptuously. “Where I’m taking you tomorrow you sure don’t need any kind of ‘spiritual trip’. It’s a waterfall around on the north side of the mountain. Ram took me there when I was a little girl.” The irritation vanished from her eyes, which were clearly elsewhere.
“Sounds like a good place to begin,” Eugene agreed.
“Excuse me—I couldn’t help listening.” The cashier smiled at the clichéd opening. “I was enjoying your comments about the nature of our activities up here. Some of them are a little peculiar.” He directed this last remark to Catherine and then looked at Eugene. “But if you’re at all interested in checking out any of the less extreme, there’s a lady who’s lived here for years who’s had some pretty far-out experiences with Shasta. Her name’s Roberta; she’s a beautiful person. Has these meetings on Friday nights during the summer. Anyone can come, and they usually turn out to be real highs.”
Eugene wished he hadn’t said anything. Not only did the meetings sound dreadful, but his timing couldn’t have been worse. Catherine had her back up now and Eugene would probably end up having to defend Roberta on principle. Seeing no reason to be rude, however, he affected a mild interest: “Really? Where does she live?”
“Over on Maple; that’s two blocks south. Four-twenty-four Maple’s the address.”
“I’ll meet you over at the market,” Catherine said, either in disinterest or irritation. She laid a ten-dollar bill on the counter and walked out, leaving the two men to exchange an ambiguous expression which could be taken any number of ways.
“Well we might check it out,” Eugene said, “but we’ll be campin’ out. Might get a little funky to come stompin’ into someone’s living room.”
“Don’t let that stop you—but if you’re gonna be campin’, great! Panther Meadows isn’t crowded yet. Later in the summer its full of tents and partyin’, you’ll still have it pretty much to yourselves. It’s right at the end of the road up the mountain.”
“Okay—thanks for the information.” Eugene picked up their change and the bag of groceries and walked out to the bike. He had just finished packing everything when Catherine came over with apples, nectarines, assorted vegetables and the peanut butter. Except for two apples, it all just fit. They ate the apples standing in the street grinning at each other.
“Well, where do we go first?” he asked.
“Well,” she replied, mimicking him and enjoying her apple, “it’s kind of late. Let’s take the road up to the ski lift—that’s as far as it goes—and camp tonight in Panther Meadows. It shouldn’t be too crowded yet.”
“That’s what your friend said.” He nodded toward the store.
“Yeah, well we agree on a lot of things,” she said, her mouth full of apple. “Share the same interests you know.”
“I noticed.”
“Yeah, we were at the resurrection together.” Eugene laughed. “Course that was several lifetimes ago. He was a skeptic then—didn’t believe Christ could pull it off. I’m the one who convinced him to go see the show.”
“See the show?” Eugene tried to keep from choking on his apple.
She nodded. “Blew his mind.”
“…Listen,” he said finally, “what about this waterfall of yours?”
“We’ll save that for tomorrow, when we have more time.”
“Okay, let’s go.” He tossed his core into a trash receptacle on the sidewalk twenty or thirty feet away, and Catherine matched him. They acknowledged each other’s skill without discussion—feeling pretty good about being alive right now—and headed up the mountain.
The air grew crisper, the sky subtly bluer. The sound of the motorcycle bounced back at them from trees and exposed seams of rock cut away for the hi
ghway, then seemed to fade away altogether when the road left the forest long enough to present an increasingly grander vista of the hazy blue tiers of the Cascades, the valley floor and the heavy coniferous shawl that Shasta wore over its shoulders.
* * *
Late afternoon: the tent was up and they had chosen a spot where they could sit against a fallen tree and watch the sun set against the face of Mt. Shasta. Although chipmunks scurried about exploring this possible new food source, their eagerness only counterpointed the sense of stillness the two of them felt. For a long time they sat there neither talking nor looking directly at each other. It took little wisdom to know enough to un-focus the eyes and let a scene like this play freely across them, until a degree of hypnosis had occurred. To let the majesty of a mountain peak speak directly to the soul, gently and easily persuading the mind to rest.
It was Catherine who first spoke, but in a tone of voice so soothing and at peace it was as if even speech had been invested with silence. “Isn’t it wonderful? …You see what I mean about not needing to add anything?”
Eugene said nothing for some time, and she felt no need for an answer. “…I can understand, though, how it inspires people to want to share their feelings.”
She laughed silkily. “Whether anybody else wants to or not.”
“Right.”
“You feel any ‘strange’ vibrations yet?” She caused her voice to quiver, like the TV host of a late Saturday night freak show.
Eugene smiled. “Not yet. Not what I’d call ‘strange’ anyway.” He made a weak pass at the eerie voice effect himself.
What exactly is it you expect to find up here?”
“…I’m not really expecting anything. I’ll take what comes.”